Here Are My 9 Biggest Twitter Pet Peeves… What Are Yours?

Twitter’s a great resource. Without it, I wouldn’t have found my current job or my agent. But there are certain things about Twitter, or the way people use Twitter, that are just plain weird or annoying. I don’t usually like to write rant posts, but I thought other people would find this entertaining and could add to the list (please do in the comments!).

So without further ado, here are my biggest Twitter pet peeves:

1. The fact that blocking people does nothing.

OK, it does something — basically, it mutes the blocked person from your Twitter stream. So they can @ at you repeatedly, but you won’t any of these tweets in your Twitter stream. But they can see everything you tweet, they can still tweet at you, and if someone searches for all mentions of you, their tweets will show up in the search results. It’s super lame. Blocking should effectively BLOCK people from seeing your tweets if they’re logged into Twitter. Sure, they could still see your tweets if they log out, but really, most people aren’t savvy enough to realize this anyway. Scoff all you want, but it’s true.

2. When people repeatedly follow and unfollow.

I only follow a few hundred people on Twitter — people I actually know or have met in real life, or the people I followed back when I first joined Twitter in 2008 and therefore share some weird loyalty. Other than that, I use lists to organize who I really follow on Twitter. Most of these lists are private. So trying to get my attention with the follow-unfollow-follow-again trick simply isn’t going to work. Sorry.

3. When people @ me with irrelevant links.

This is called spam, people. Nothing will get you blocked faster.

4. When people favorite every tweet in which I’m mentioned.

Yes, you read that correctly. I didn’t say “when people favorite every tweet I tweet.” Sometimes, someone will favorite every tweet I’m mentioned in for days. I assume it’s to get my attention so I’ll follow them. Once it went on for over a week, and this person even favorited the most mundane tweets (like “@DianaUrban Yep!” or “@DianaUrban Sounds great!”). After a while I figured the favoriting must be automated, but it was still creepy.

5. When people treat my personal Twitter like my work email address.

I am not referring to my colleagues — I’m referring to folks who know where I work and ask me work-related questions at any hour/day of the week. This wouldn’t bother me so much if people didn’t feel entitled to an immediate response and get angry otherwise. Yes, I list my job title in my Twitter bio. Yes, I tweet my favorite company blog posts. But this doesn’t mean that I’m willing — or able — to look into specific technical issues at 2am on a Saturday or in the middle of a vacation. I’m a regular person with a life, too.

6. When strangers try to start arguments.

Sometimes I’ll tweet a link, and someone will @ me with 5-10 tweets in a row disagreeing with whatever link I tweeted. First of all, replying with any more than two tweets in a row is pretty aggressive, IMO. I really don’t like engaging in public arguments, so I usually ignore this. Your points might be totally valid, but they really belong in a comment on the blog post I’ve just shared so the author can be the one to respond.

7. When strangers go out of their way to be mean.

Sometimes I’ll tweet an opinion about something, and some stranger who’s not even remotely affiliated with whatever I’ve said will insult me. They won’t just disagree with me — they’ll insult me as a person. I usually won’t even know how they found my tweet to begin with, or why they’d bother to reply. It’s only happened a few times, fortunately. Each time I kill them with niceness: “Thank you SO much for tweeting this, you’ve made my day!” or “What a lovely thing to say to a complete stranger on Twitter! You rock.” But really, people can be such assholes. The world would be a better place if people focused on more productive endeavors than insulting strangers on Twitter.

8. When people live-tweet TV shows.

First of all, you’re spoiling the show for those of us who don’t have time to watch TV programs live all the time. Second of all… why? Just… why? Anyone else watching the show knows what’s happening. They’re watching the show. Anyone who’s not watching the show isn’t appreciating your spoilers. So… why???

9. When people retweet every tweet they’re mentioned in.

Are these people just trying to look popular? This is what the favorite button is for, people. *Unfollow.*

There are a bunch of other things that annoy me about Twitter, but they’re not a big enough deal to gripe about and can usually be solved by a simple unfollow or removal from a list. But these are the big ones.

What about you? What are your biggest Twitter pet-peeves? Feel free to use the comments below to vent!

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About Me

I write dark, twisty thrillers for teens, including All Your Twisted Secrets (HarperTeen 3/17/2020). When I'm not torturing fictional characters, I’m a marketing manager at BookBub, a leading book discovery platform, where I publish book marketing tips.